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Nigel Farage launches a pamphlet on a trade exit from the EU, June, 2015. Demotix/ Guy Corbishley. All rights reserved.Expect an invitation from Nigel
Farage soon. If you are on the British left and support democracy, the UKIP
leader, no doubt full of mock-pathos, will ask you to join him in opposing the
European Union. Arguing that the EU has crushed the democratic hopes of tiny
Greece, he will say it is better to be outside altogether. But although the
European Union in its present neoliberal form depends on the single currency to
enforce its brutal political logic, the problems of the EU and the euro are not
the same. Different policies will be required to answer the challenges of two
different problems. Farage's solution - rejection of all internationalism in
favour of pure national sovereignty - is no more equitable a solution than
remaining in an unreformed EU.

There is a clear line out of this confusion. The research of
Alan W. Cafruny and Magnus Ryner, especially in the book they edited, A
Ruined Fortress?:Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe (2003) helps
us grasp the current impasse. These unorthodox historical materialists present
an overwhelming amount of evidence that the Europe of social welfare and
corporatist labour relations is dead and buried. The tipping point was the 1999
launch of the single currency, since when "a novel and qualitative transformation
in the nature of the Union" (4) has taken place. Which is to say, the euro
did not simply supplement a pre-existing institutional mix, but was rather
introduced as the means of securing radically new directions of policy.

At the high point of europhilia, during the 2000s, when European
intellectuals and academics lined up to praise the transnational model of
"social Europe" (if not always the war-mongering aspects of its
foreign policy), the political logic behind the euro was trashing that postwar
legacy. Through the 2000 Lisbon Agenda, European institutions and European
national leaders, whose overlapping but often complementary jurisdictions drove
integration forward, proved they were unanimously ‘pro-market.’ The model of
combating stagnation and low employment across the EU was to smash up social
protections and introduce market-based ‘competitiveness’ into inflexible or
heavily-regulated industrial sectors. In other words, it was neoliberalism
incarnate. Today its failure is widely acknowledged, even among
European leaders. However, the institutional legacy and the political logic
remain very much in place.

The European Monetary Union (EMU), offspring of neoliberal
European integration, is a mechanism for enforcing the political will of
European elites. The agonising destruction of the Greek economy since the first
bailout in 2010 attests to this. Ever more onerous austerity has been heaped
onto the people of Europe since 2010. The no vote in Greece's recent referendum
was widely described as a simple no to austerity, though not to Europe. But
that is not quite true. The no was a vote against the neoliberal politics of
the eurozone. Once again, this characteristic of the eurozone is not down to
the various ideologies of its leaders. Austerity is imposed by the single
currency as such, or rather by the political logic that is embedded in the
single currency.

The euro is the primary weapon of enforcing
"competitive adjustments" and "internal deflation" on
member states in imitation of the German model. It is also increasingly used to
cow members into dismantling their welfare states and labour market
protections. Exit from the euro or sustained social collapse are the only
choices now facing Greece. The Greek economist and Syriza MP Costas Lapavitsas
recently spoke
of the way in which the euro "crystallizes the class logic of the
European elites." Lapavitsas is, along with others including the Keynesian
economist Heiner Flassbeck, responsible for originating the definitive critique
of the euro as a weapon of neoliberal financialisation. In his analysis, the
monetary union imposes a deliberate political logic, one which has repeatedly
failed to create equitable growth. Instead it has worked to Germany's advantage
while crushing less competitive peripheral states. It is inevitable, then, that
any convincing progressive movement in Europe will have to challenge the EU's
most grievous mechanism of enforcing neoliberalism, the euro.

The European Union, in its current form, depends on the
European Monetary Union and its harrowing neoliberal political logic. But that
does not mean that the European Union and the euro are reducible to the same
political problem. Indeed, in cases like Britain, which is not a member of the
eurozone and probably never will be, this distinction can be brought into quite
sharp relief. Britain is not subject to the mechanism of the single currency.
It has the means of imposing austerity all by itself - and has ably
demonstrated it. British elites do not need Brussels to do their dirty work for
them. They remain very much powerful enough to do it all by themselves. This is
the manifest deception in leaving the European Union. Britons will be trading
one balance of forces within the European power bloc for another at least as dangerous, if more
distinctly Anglocentric.

Farage likes to neatly divide power into simple geographic
or ethnic polarities: Brussels vs. Britain. The immigrants vs. the British. The
metropolitan elites vs. the Middle Englander family. However, power usually
comes from ‘overlapping’ institutional and constitutional arrangements. In the
case of the European Union, the supranational body has often operated as a
semi-autonomous, relatively disinterested enforcer of legislation that is
unpalatable to local elites. This might take the form of basic health and
safety legislation or it might take the form of introducing labour market
flexibility. While the national state exercises a degree of ‘relative autonomy’
from the national capitalist class, the EU ideally operates with a degree of
autonomy not only from states but also from transnational capitalists. This
does not, of course, mean that it is anti-capitalist. The EU is simply in a
position to take unpopular decisions on behalf of European capitalism as a
whole. This has historically been key to driving European integration: the
aspects of national sovereignty surrendered by states have invariably been
those least useful to ruling elites. Thus the power bloc is enlarged and new
balances which reinforce class rule are created. All of which makes the
distinction between an anti-sovereign EU and a sovereign nation much harder to
create in political practice.

Thus the left is stuck between two competing conceptions of
how power should be wielded over the lives of the British working class. The
most despicable and reactionary layers of the British ruling class are quite
amenable to Brexit, especially those who believe that in Europe the right kind
of turbo-capitalist financialisation is not taking root in the right ways.
Unless there is a significant change in the balance of political and social
forces within Britain in the coming year (which seems unlikely), the answer is
bleak but resounding: Britain must remain in the EU. However, with the euro
threatening rupture or even implosion, the Union that Britain remains a part of
may be changed significantly all the same.

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